Andrew Wyeth

American, 1917 - 2009

Birth-PlaceChadds Ford, PA

Death-PlaceChadds Ford, PA

BiographyAndrew Wyeth
(b. 1917)

Andrew Wyeth, the son of the well-known illustrator N. C. Wyeth, was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Wyeth was virtually a child prodigy but was not submitted to the rigorous academic training of his father's studio until age fifteen. He first achieved public recognition in 1937, with a sold-out exhibition of watercolors at Macbeth Galleries, New York. In 1940 he was the youngest member ever elected to the American Watercolor Society, and in 1945 he was elected to the National Academy of Design. About 1940 he began painting in egg tempera, a painstaking process that complemented his quick and facile watercolor technique.

In 1943 Wyeth was included in "American Realists and Magic Realists," an important show at the Museum of Modern Art. In the catalogue-and for the next two decades-Wyeth was grouped with a number of American Realists who painted disquieting, sometimes surrealistic scenes evoking the spiritual malaise and uncertainty that followed World War II. For Wyeth, this brooding and introspective emotion was universal and personal, related in part to the death of his father in a car accident in 1945.

Despite the art climate of the 1950s, which favored abstraction and denigrated Realism, Wyeth's work became famously popular. “Christina's World” (1948; Museum of Modern Art, New York) made Wyeth a household name. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s he was given one-man shows at Macbeth Gallery and M. Knoedler in New York and at Doll and Richards in Boston, and after 1944 his works were featured almost yearly across the United States, first with small groups of Realist painters or with other Wyeth family artists, and later in larger one-man shows.

McVey's Barn, 1948
Egg tempera and oil resin on Masonite, 32 3/8 X 48 in. (82.2 X 121.9 cm)
Signed (lower left): Andrew Wyeth
Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1948.24)

The New Britain painting depicts the interior of an abandoned barn that was owned by farmer John McVey, whose land adjoined Wyeths’Chadds Ford property. Most of the composition is dedicated to the description of wild hay and the beams of sunlight playing upon the weathered rafters and stalls. When first exhibited at New York's Macbeth Gallery the painting was praised for its brilliant handling of light and atmosphere, imaginative presentations of the objective world, and its masterful handling of the tempera medium. (1)

While the painting insists on the tactile qualities of the hay and the smooth boards and the warmth of the sunlight piercing the dusty atmosphere, it also contains a haunting note of melancholy in the old sled, just visible in the rafters, and in the long, covered, almost coffin-shaped wooden box. The enigmatic sled and box hint at a hidden narrative, at an explanation for the painting that goes beyond the palpable realities of texture and sunlight.

Death and decay is a major theme in Wyeth's works, both implicitly and explicitly. (2) Like “McVey's Barn”, many of his pictures evoke the loneliness of vast open spaces or empty interiors. (3) Throughout the years, Wyeth has explained a number of his paintings with brief anecdotes, which sometimes answer, but more often provoke, questions about the unsettling mood evoked. Distorted space and strange elongated angles are a vehicle for emotion. Common or mundane objects, such as a bucket, basket, boat, or sled, come to symbolize people. Versions of “McVey's Barn” resurface in “Hay Ledge” (1957; Gallet Co. Ltd., Japan) and in “Rafters” (1985; United Missouri Banks, Kansas City, Mo.), in which the artist used stored boats to symbolize their owners and the passing of time, persons, and events relegated to memory.

MAS

Bibliography:
Jay Jacobs, "Andrew Wyeth-An Unsentimental Reappraisal," “Art in America 55” (January-February 1967), pp. 24-31; Wanda M. Corn, “The Art of Andrew Wyeth” (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973); Andrew Wyeth, “Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: A Conversation with Andrew Wyeth by Thomas Hoving” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978); John Wilmerding, “Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures” (New York: Harry. N. Abrams, 1987); Andrew Wyeth, “Autobiography”, intro. by Thomas Hoving (Boston: Bullfinch Press, 1995).

Notes:

. Margaret Breuning, "Revealing Anew the Magic of Andrew Wyeth," Art Digest 23 (November 15, 1948): 28.
2. Corn, “Art of Andrew Wyeth”, p. 140.
3. John L. Ward, “American Realist Painting, 1945-1980” (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), pp. 52-68; Greta Berman and Jeffrey Wechsler, “Realism and Realities: The Other Side of American Painting, 1940-1960”, exhib. cat. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Art Gallery, 1981), pp. 62-63, 77.

Person Type(not assigned)